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This was the moral straitjacket into which the royal family was to be confined, trapped
by an image of its own creation.
The public discussion of their dilemma concentrated the couple’s minds on the realities
of their future. Townsend wrote of his meeting with Princess Margaret on the evening of
22 October: ‘We were both exhausted, mentally, emotionally, physically. We felt mute
and numbed at the centre of this maelstrom.’ Margaret spent the following day with her
sister and brother-in-law at Windsor. At one point, with Elizabeth, Philip, Margaret and
her mother present, there was an awkward episode when the Queen Mother pathetically
said that Margaret hadn’t even thought where they were going to live, whereupon Philip
said ‘very sarcastically’ that it was still possible even nowadays to buy a house and the
Queen Mother left the room angrily slamming the door. Perhaps the surroundings
reminded Margaret of her childhood and of her father and what he would have thought
of her proposed marriage, and brought home to her what she would be giving up for
love. She telephoned Townsend ‘in great distress’. ‘She did not say what had passed
between herself and her sister and her brother-in-law,’ he wrote, ‘but doubtless the stern
truth was dawning upon her.’ It was dawning upon them both. While the Windsors’
marriage had been supported by a great deal of money, the Townsends would have to
live on his pay, already stretched by the education of his two sons. For a Princess who
had once said, ‘I cannot imagine anything more wonderful than being who I am’, the
prospect of losing her royal status was unthinkable. Townsend knew that he could not
ask her to step down from her life of spoiled luxury and be an ordinary housewife. Both
of them must have realized that love was unlikely to survive the kind of mundaneness
life held out for both of them under the circumstances. The final blow was that they
would be expected to live abroad, just as the Windsors had. After a sleepless night,
Margaret had made up her mind. Early the next morning Townsend telephoned to tell
her that he thought they loved one another enough to make the sacrifice not to marry. It
was a mutual decision.
On the evening after Margaret returned from Windsor, they sat down together to
draft their statement of renunciation. When they had finished, ‘For a few moments’,
Townsend wrote, ‘we looked at each other; there was a wonderful tenderness in her eyes
which reflected, I suppose, the look in mine. We had reached the end of the road.’ By the
27th Margaret had taken the irrevocable step of officially informing the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr Fisher, of their decision. The apprehensive prelate, expecting an
awkward discussion, reached for a reference book. ‘You can put away your books,
Archbishop,’ the Princess told him. ‘I am not going to marry Peter Townsend.’ They
spent one final weekend together with Lord and Lady Rupert Nevill at their house near
Uckfield in Sussex, which, Margaret later told friends, she had enjoyed more than any
other of her life. All the difficult decisions had been made: ‘They both knew that they
loved each other more than anyone else in the world and they both felt they had made
the right decision.’ Early on the morning of Monday, 31 October, Townsend came to her
room to say goodbye. Instead of feeling agonized, they had felt complete contentment.
They returned separately to London and at six o’clock Townsend made a last visit to the